


Wings of Feather or Bone

by Poplitealqueen



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Bare minimum for the win, M/M, Other, Post Book 7 AU, Potions Master Draco Malfoy, Professor Harry Potter, Vaguest tags in the universe but tags are hard man, kinda sorta
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-14
Updated: 2018-06-14
Packaged: 2019-05-23 05:07:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14927703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Poplitealqueen/pseuds/Poplitealqueen
Summary: Ten years have passed since the end of the Second Wizarding War, and the lives of those effected most by Voldemort have finally begun to settle. Harry Potter has seemingly disappeared from world, and Draco Malfoy -- now a professor at Hogwarts himself -- wouldn't exactly say that he's happy, but he's certainly content. As far as former Death Eaters go, he has it good.Then, everything changes.Harry Potter comes back.





	Wings of Feather or Bone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For all intents and purposes, this first chapter is the prologue. It would have looked awful to add that in the chapter title itself, though, so I'm telling you here. Is that cheating? Lmaoooo, nah. It's fanfic! None of it is cheating! Except, like, plagiarism. But that's not this, swearsies.
> 
> God, here I am trying not to ramble. What a good job I'm doing. Moving on!
> 
> This is my first rodeo writing fanfic in the Harry Potter fandom. Hopefully, that's not easy to tell. Hopefully, by the time this fic is finished you'll be in awe of my remarkable skill! Haha. Comments and kudos are greatly appreciated, as always. I hope you guys enjoy!
> 
> -Pop
> 
> PS: Chapter warnings are at the end of the chapter, as well as other notes/babbling. Rambling is who I am; I might as well accept it.

****

**L** ike every night after lights out, as she laid on her back in her bed, Vermilia waited for her magic to appear.

She searched for it within her, tried to find the key that would finally unlock it from that place deep inside. She willed, she felt, just like Mum and Dad had instructed her to countless times once, but nothing appeared. Like always. The door within her remained shut, and all she could feel was the chill of February winter outside of her room.

Eyes squeezed shut until she thought they might tear apart, she continued to search. It was only the first caw of a crow that broke her concentration. A warbling, low call just outside her window, and Vermilia found the first line of the old rhyme her Mum had once sung bubbling up unbidden in her mind as her eyes snapped open.

_One for sorrow._

Now, she waited for the next crow instead. Crows flocked to Blackfeather; that was how the institute had gotten its name, many years back when it was still called an insane asylum. _“Blackfeather Institute For Mental Health”_ , or “school”, as some of the more hesitant parents were told by overeager orderlies intent on assuring them that their children would be well and properly cared for nowadays. Vermilia didn’t understand that about muggles. Whatever name they gave it, this place was still the same.

Muggles... _no._ Vermilia clenched her teeth until the bones in her jaw popped, and instead of willing herself to manifest magic or counting crow calls, she willed herself to scrub that word from her memory. That daft, made-up curse of her’s. If the doctor or the nurse that did the rounds found out that she’d so much as thought it, then it would be a different round of medications once again, needles and pills, and a different sort of stupor than the one she was finally beginning to get used to.

 _Muggle is not a word,_ she told herself, imagining Doctor Isidor’s calm, insistent voice saying it to her in one of their sessions. _It doesn’t exist, and neither does magic. You mustn’t confuse madness for magic, Miss Harsh. You mustn’t, or we’ll have to start over. You mustn’t, you mustn’t, you mustn’t--_

A second crow answered the first, its sharp cry piercing the panic clouding Vermilia’s head like a ray of sunlight. Doctor Isidor’s words softened into whispers and then to nothing at all, and Vermilia smiled.

_Two for bliss._

That meant tomorrow would be a good day. Maybe, even, the day her magic manifested, the day her parents would return and take her home, the day an owl would show up outside her window instead of a crow, with a wax-sealed letter in its beak…

A third crow began to caw then, and then another. Then another. Vermilia learned long ago to stop counting after two -- to take any joy she was lucky to get and hold fast to it, but the calls only grew into a cacophony that was impossible to ignore.

Vermilia wondered if it was _her_ that brought the crows to Blackfeather now. That perhaps it was a strange, subtle sort of magic that allowed her to summon them. But if that were true, shouldn’t she be able to control them as well? When she tried to get them to stop their swelling cries, it didn’t work. The crows continued to caw, louder and louder.

It sounded as if hundreds upon hundreds of crows sat upon the roofs and the power-lines and in the branches of dead trees like jet-black leaves outside of the ward, eyes glittering as bright as the moon from the light that escaped the building’s many windows. Vermilia jerked her hands to cover her ears as their deep-throated squawking rose,  but the limb restraints around her wrists held fast. She couldn’t move her hands up higher than her chest. _To protect you,_ Doctor Isidor had assured her as he'd helped the nurse put her to bed. _You know better than anyone how dangerous your night terrors can be._

She did. She knew it all too well, but all her sessions and all her medications, Vermilia couldn't convince herself that none of it was real. Not completely.

If she had been able to see outside the railings encasing her tiny window that night, if she had indeed been able to leave her bed at all, Vermilia would have seen one particular crow flutter down from the rest. It would leave its perch a bird and land on the snowy pavement a man, hunched beneath a large leather coat against the evening chill. She would have seen him make his way to the entrance of the Blackfeather children's ward, his head stooped and his gait rushed, and clutched in his hand, a stem of thin wood emitting a light at the end like a torch.

But she did not see this happen. Vermilia only fell into a fitful, fidgeting slumber as the crows continued to caw and the stranger stepped into the ward.

The bored orderly sitting behind the front desk jerked up from his mobile phone when he heard the front doors slide open. He could have sworn he’d locked them. One of his hands flew to the panic button just beneath his desk out of habit; he was the jumpy sort, especially when he worked the night shift.

“‘lo?” he called out as the doors slid shut, trying to make his voice sound as intimidating as possible. “Who is tha’?”

The stranger didn’t respond at first. He was a tall man in a tall coat, with long dark hair and a matching beard, and as he dusted snowy slush off of his shoulders and head, the orderly noticed a particularly odd kind of torch in one of his hands. It was as thin as a paintbrush, yet emitted a light so brilliant that the orderly almost had to cover his eyes. When the stranger noticed him watching, the light went out without so much as the snap of a switch.

“Hello, I’d like to see someone,” the stranger replied. His accent was Southeastern, but still clearly British, though what someone like him was doing out in West Country in this sort of ungodly cold made the orderly bristle with apprehension. He certainly didn’t look like a parent or a concerned loved one. He looked like a vagrant.

“Visitin’ hours are over,” the orderly snapped. “Come back later.”

The stranger did the opposite, and approached the desk without any hesitation.

The orderly’s finger stroked the panic button, and his entire body tensed. If only it were one of the loony kids, he thought, then this would be easy.

“D’you not hear me?” the orderly snarled. “Feck off!”

Instead, the stranger sighed. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said slowly, and while the orderly focused on his face, he waved the odd torch subtly in the air. “There’s someone I’d like to visit.”

It was as if he’d said a magic word, because suddenly the orderly was remarkably at ease. The stranger felt like an old friend come to visit after a long absence--someone the orderly knew he could trust. He grinned, took his finger from the panic button, and stood up.

“‘Course, mate. Not a problem!” he said cheerily, turning toward the locked gate that led into the ward proper and fishing the lanyard with his card pass out from underneath his jumper. “Anyone particular?”

The stranger came to stand behind him. “Vermilia Harsh?”

“Ah. She’s a little loon, that one, but then again aren’t they all here?” The orderly chuckled to himself as he slid his pass over the electronic reader of the gate. The screen beeped and turned green, and as it did he slid a key into the hole beside it. The gate slid open with a loud crunch of metal. “Who is she t’you? Daughter or summit?”

“When was she admitted?” The stranger asked, ignoring the question.

The orderly didn’t notice, and pursed his lips in uncertainlt as he led the stranger down the carpeted hallway. It was against hospital policy to tell anyone something like that, even good friends. He didn't see the subtle swish of the torch in the stranger’s hand, nor question when he suddenly found himself telling the truth. “Er...I’d say three, four years ago. It happened ‘fore I was assigned here, an’ no one goes near her ‘cept Doctor Isidor and the nurse that administers the injections.”

The stranger frowned, yet his voice remained level. “Why?”

The orderly’s head was beginning to ache, spinning in a way that didn’t feel like a usual headache. He wondered if he was getting ill. “Doctor’s orders. She refuses t'respond to treatment, always attackin’ others, ravin’ an' rantin'. Just yesterday I heard her shoutin’ some foreign cuss at the poor nurse -- _muggle_ , I believe it was? Yeh.” He shook his head and stopped in front of one particular door. “Whatever tha’ soddin’ means.”

The stranger hummed in response, his eyes dragging themselves away from the orderly and to the door. Above his spectacles, his dark brows furrowed with apprehension. He stepped forward, torch brandished at shoulder level as he went to turn the doorknob.

“Oh wait! Wait!” The orderly shouted, and the stranger froze.

“What?” he hissed.

Shaking a ring of keys of all shapes and sizes that he had pulled from his pocket, the orderly shouldered in front of the tall stranger and inserted one into the hole in the doorknob. “We don’t tell none of the parents about this little security measure -- don’t want to worry them, y’know? Jus’ something me and the other lads on night duty do to keep the loons in line.” A mechanism clicked, the round knob turned in the orderly’s large hand, and the door opened to a small room lit only by the moonlight arcing from a window set with thick iron bars. “Right. There we are.”

“Thank you very much,” The stranger said, and pointed his torch at the orderly. Just as the orderly was turning around to leave, the stranger whispered something in a language he didn’t recognize. A spark of bright light leapt from the torch’s end and hit him square in the chest. The orderly stepped back in surprise, eyes going wide before his entire body went rigid and fell in the doorway between the room and hallway with a loud _smack._

As the stranger stepped over his frozen form (which still followed him with its eyes) and into the dark room, he said with a fierceness that cut sharper than the cold outside, “I don't fancy locking children up.”

The noise woke Vermilia from her unsettled sleep. Her dark eyes flew open at the sound of the orderly falling. She winced as the sound of the crows outside hit her once more, and he stranger noticed the look of pain on her face. The sound of the crows seemed to register with him suddenly, as if he hadn’t been able to notice it before. He held up his torch, flicked it in the air, and the crows all went silent at once.

Vermilia swallowed dryly, her head still thumping with the echoes of the crows. An endless number that no poem could ever count. Part of her knew that it was the stranger’s doing, yet the other found itself hesitating. _It’s madness, not magic,_ Doctor Isidor said in her head. _You mustn’t, you mustn't, you mustn't._

But somehow, without even really acknowledging it, she knew that she must.

“Thank you,” she whispered to the stranger.

For the first time that night, the stranger smiled. A smile that promised not just sympathy, but under understanding as well. Something that Vermilia hadn’t had since first being brought to Blackfeather.

He approached her, hand outstretched like she was some dangerous beast.

“It’s alright,” he said. "You're welcome."

The stranger undid her tethers, careful not to touch her directly, and Vermilia quickly sat up in bed. She stretched the numbness from neck and shoulders, and scratched the spot on her nose that had been itching for ages.

Vermilia spared a quick glance at the orderly, Mr. Hobble, as vile as they came. The only thing moving on him were his beady eyes, dashing back and forth in every direction like flies.  Then she turned her head up to get a proper look at the stranger. What caught her attention first wasn’t the wand in his hand, nor his odd, large coat with too many pockets, nor even the round, wire-framed spectacles perched upon his nose that were so out of fashion that she almost giggled. No, the first thing she noticed, the first and last thing that convinced her that this was real and not another drug-induced dream of hope, was the distinctive lightning-shaped scar that traveled jaggedly down one side of his forehead.

She squeaked like a mouse caught by surprise, and her voice even quieter and trembling with awe, “Sir, you? You’re--?”

The stranger knelt down to meet her at eye level, still offering a friendly smile. “My name is Harry Potter,” he said, “and I’m here to save you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for child abuse and medical abuse. While it shouldn't need to be said that my portrayal of mental health facilities via Blackfeather Insitute For Mental Health isn't necessarily true for all, or even any, mental health hospitals, I'll still say it anyway.
> 
> Don't get your facts from fanfic. Use Google, read a book. I'm not a fucking bibliography.
> 
> There~! Nonfun part done.
> 
> The art at the beginning of the chapter is done by yours truly. Each chapter will have art like that, as an homage to how much I loved the chapter art in the original Harry Potter books as a kid. Three cheers for nostalgia!
> 
> Harsh is pronounced 'hursh' in the context of Vermilia's name. It's an Indian name. She's Indian. She's brown. Just in case I get legions of folks wanting to draw fanart!
> 
> The next chapter will be up next Thursday. Thanks so much for reading, fam!
> 
> (man, so many exclamation points)


End file.
